Saturday, March 31, 2012

The campaign by Media Matters to drive Rush Limbaugh off the air over his "slut" comments about Sandra Fluke, the woman who said her sexual appetite cost her $1,000 a year for birth control, has ended up driving thousands of new listeners to the show.

Overall, Limbaugh said, his show’s ratings are higher on all 600 stations that carry it, and up as high as 60 percent at one station.

“The simple answer is that on the range of all 600 radio stations, our ratings are up anywhere from 10 to 60 percent, depending on the station,” he said.

“And that’s as detailed as I’m going to get,” Limbaugh added. “What I mean by that is we could be up 33 percent on one station, 12 percent on another — 60 percent is the top that we’re up on another. We’re up 50 percent in a number of places.”

Triumphing in his apparent victory over activists agitating for an ad boycott, Limbaugh said, “The advertisers who hung in here are going gangbusters, yes. I mean, that’s the simple truth. The only ones who got hurt are the ones who left. And that’s its own tragedy because they left under false, trumped up, unreal pretenses.”

Two small stations dropped Rush's show, but a new talk station in liberal Fargo, ND picked him up right in the middle of the controversy, so there's been little change in the network. And according to another source, the net effect percentage change in network revenue from the few advertisers that bailed is in the single digits. That will turn around soon.